All this “beiging of America stuff” — btw, have you listened to the podcast? — is muddying things for both statisticians and the government. “Under Department of Education requirements that take effect this year, for instance, any student…who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students of non-Hispanic mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category, a catchall that detractors describe as inadequately detailed. A child of black and American Indian parents, for example, would be in the same category as, say, a child of white and Asian parents.”